In this article, We will try to understand various ways to automate the importing of data into Data Extensions using Automation Studio. Some of the business use cases include
1. When you want to load delta every night at a particular time frame or whenever the delta file is placed in the marketing cloud ftp location.
2. We might want to export all the tracking data into third party system from salesforce marketing cloud through nightly jobs
3. Import full data from external systems into the marketing cloud in realtime.
For this Demo, i am using an existing Data extension Customer_Form and we will schedule an Import process to automatically load data into Customer_Form data extension.
Navigation: Marketing Cloud Login –> Hover over Journey Builder tab –> Select Automation Studio
Click on New Automation to create an Automation activity. Our starting sources will be either a schedule or File drop. For this demo we will use File drop as our starting source.
Click on configure button in the filedrop to provide file naming pattern and select triggered automations as shown below.
Click on Done and select File transfer from Activities
Click on choose from File Transfer and Create New File transfer activity with desired details.
Click on Done and drag Import file from Activities Palette.
Select Choose from Import file and select the existing Import definition or select a new Import Definition.
Click on Next and provide Import file format with the desired name. Select the format as shown so that it autogenerates with date and time which will help to identify the file without duplicates.
Select the desired data extension(Customer_form) from available data extensions and click on Next. In Mapping tab select desired data action such as Add only/Update only/ Add and update only/ Overwrite and Select Map by Header Row/Map by Ordinal/Map Manually.
Review the details and click on Finish.
Click on Activate and this import activity will be triggered whenever there is a new file drop into ftp location.
